Study Says Good Video Game Players Are More Intelligent

(CBS LOCAL) – Really good at playing video games? A new study says that your skills may actually show how intelligent you are.

Researchers in Great Britain say they discovered two multiplayer games that are so similar to an IQ test that all the strategy and game play can measure a person’s intelligence.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, said playing a genre of games called Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) showed the same increases in intelligence as IQ tests show when a person gets older. The scientists from the University of York used two of the most widely-played MOBAs for their experiments: League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2).

“Research in the past has pointed to the fact that people who are good at strategy games such as chess tend to score highly at IQ tests. Our research has extended this to games that millions of people across the planet play every day,” Professor Alex Wade said, via Science Daily.

While strategy games were found to be a strong indicator of how the mind grows as a person gets older and smarter, shooting games were not as helpful. The researchers found that first-person shooter video games could not accurately determine intelligence. They also showed that a player’s performance declined as they left their teenage years.

“Unlike First Person Shooter (FPS) games where speed and target accuracy are a priority, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas rely more on memory and the ability to make strategic decisions taking into account multiple factors,” researcher Athanasios Kokkinakis said.

The study follows a German report released in September that found children who played video games showed higher brain activity. That study revealed that kids who played video games regularly were able to learn faster and solve problems more quickly than their classmates who didn’t.